PCB Design and Functionality

The cards both follow the reference design, but the stickers on the coolers indicate that they sell under the XFX brand.

The Radeon HD 5750 is only 182 millimeters long (measuring from the mounting bracket to the edge of the cooler) while the HD 5770 is 38 millimeters longer. This is an advantage in comparison with the senior Radeon HD 58x0 series products. There are no decorative covers on the reverse side of the PCBs, which is good for cooling.

Each card has a PCIe 2.1 connector, two DVI-I ports, one HDMI connector and a DisplayPort. Some of the hot air from the card’s cooler is exhausted through the slits in the mounting bracket.

With the coolers removed, the cards look like this:

The memory chips are placed on both sides of each card. There are two CrossFireX connectors and one 6-pin power plug on each PCB. The power systems differ dramatically:

These were discussed in detail in our previous report on the Radeon HD 5750 and 5770 cards.

Both GPUs, which measure a mere 137 sq. millimeters and have unusually tall dies, were manufactured on Taiwan and differ with their markings and dates of manufacture.

As you can see, there is no protective frame around the graphics cores, so you should be most careful when removing or installing coolers on them. A Radeon HD 5750 GPU incorporates 720 universal shader processors, 36 texture-mapping units, and 16 raster back-ends. A Radeon HD 5770 GPU has the same number of RBEs, but 800 shader processors and 40 texture-mapping units. The GPU frequencies differ considerably: the HD 5750 clocks its GPU at 700MHz while the HD 5770, at 850MHz.

Both cards are equipped with the same GDDR5 memory chips manufactured by Hynix (marked as H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C, a rated frequency of 5000MHz).

The Radeon HD 5750 has a memory frequency of 4600MHz and the Radeon HD 5770, 4800MHz. We have some overclocking margin here, although the simplified PCB of the Radeon HD 5750 may affect an overclocking attempt. The memory bus is 128 bit wide. The total amount of graphics memory is 1024MB.